An industrial scale conveyor, handling articles for washing and subsequent sorting, needs to maintain an economic rate, based upon the required number of articles per second on the conveyor. To manage this manually requires a sufficient number of operators, proportional to the rate of articles requiring sorting.
One method of managing the rate of articles is to automatically sort the articles as they reach a particular zone either robotically or through mechanical sorting means.
However, this is not effective if the articles are different with the number of categories of articles progressively increasing the complexity of the sorting process.
One such application is for an industrial dish washer whereby the articles may be normal crockery (e.g plates, cups, sauces and bowls) and cutlery (e.g fork, knife, spoon, chopsticks etc). A further complexity includes sourcing said articles from different locations. Using the dishwasher analogy further, a bowl from one source may be completely different from a bowl from another source and in fact each source may have several different types of bowls.
Accordingly, mechanical sorting based on shape is not viable and so opportunities for automatic sorting and so operating the conveyor at an economic rate according to the prior art is unavailable.